glitches

Oh, my friends.  I'm so discouraged today.  I feel like everything is taking forever, nothing is going right, and I'm not sure what my goal is in the first place.  It's hard to keep one's eye on the prize when there isn't a clear prize in mind.  And the price of the prize is so high- right now my family is out playing in the new snow, while I'm at home pounding away at the keyboard trying to find something suitable for presentation.  Trying to make old software do new tricks, trying to feel like I've actually made some progress on something even though I just haven't done nearly what I thought I could do this month. 

I miss you, my friends.  I miss reading your blogs, miss your comments, miss writing to you and having the satisfaction of completion, the satisfaction of having written something that was actually coherent and heart-felt. 

I thought if I wrote about it here, I would get fired up enough to do the next step, but I'm just not.  I'm just, .... broke.  Not quite broken, but definitely broke.

Still here

You may have been wondering where I've been these days.  Or maybe you know me well enough not to wonder?  I'm trying to graduate in May, which means I have to hustle for the next few months to finish this dissertation and get it off to my committee.  I haven't had a huge amount of luck with getting participants for the study, but I'm getting closer and I hope to have enough by the time I graduate to make it a publishable study. 

Mondays are really hard for me.  Every monday that comes along I struggle to get going, struggle to get excited about another week where I feel like I can't get enough work done, can't find continuity to think about my research, can't spend enough time on work and family and still maintain my sanity.  I've been going to bed at 8:00, partly because I am reading fiction at bedtime so I can sleep without obsessing over my research, and partly because I'm getting up at 5:30 every morning with the baby.  So Mondays come along and I have to set myself up for success by re-establishing my work patterns and getting my butt in gear.

I just wanted you to know that I'm thinking of you, and I will try to post more, but I can't make any promises.  If you know me IRL, find me on facebook and we can keep up with each other there. 

smooches.

bagpipes

This is one of those days where I am happy to see the end arrive, yet I waited forever for it to come.  Sweets had his graduation today, and all that work and waiting and patience has paid off.  Finally.  There were times when I was choked up with emotion, times when I felt humbled and excited to be surrounded by so many smart, devoted, passionate people.  And there were times when I was exhausted and overwhelmed and a little frantic.

It didn't help that the lentil woke up at 5:30 this morning, and that I had been up already for an hour thinking about how much I wanted to be asleep.  It didn't help to think that my cat is probably dead and that sweets leaves early tomorrow for a two week trip and he will miss both our birthdays.  It definitely wasn't useful to think that I get to spend most of tomorrow entertaining his relatives and my former step mother and my little sister when I really need to FINALLY start working on my own freaking work.

But seeing my handsome husband wearing his step-dad's cap and gown and walk in that procession with all those other people was amazing.  I looked up and that was my husband, and he was smiling and happy and in the moment, basking in the glory.  He was there, celebrating a moment we've been awaiting for so long.  And there were bagpipes.  Bagpipes always make me a little misty.

But now I'm exhausted and I have a difficult two weeks ahead of me.  If you don't hear much from me, please forgive me.  I'm just struggling under the weight of responsibility.  I'll be here, and I'll be back in full force in just a few short weeks.

academic meetings

I had a few meetings with advisors today, and I'm feeling a little raw.  The meetings went as well as they could, but I was urged to get off my ass and do some work for once, and nobody ever likes hearing that.

The good news is that I am doing work.  the bad news is that I need to do more.  lots more.

A few months ago I emailed a copy of a manuscript off to a professor to get her comments so I could submit it to a journal.  We finally met today and she was kind but clear- it's not ready.  In fact, it's nowhere near ready.  Her words: "It seemed like a very good student paper."

Ouch.  I mean, yes- it did start out as a student paper, but it's been revised several times since and it needs to get sent off already.  Nobody likes being told they are amateur.  Even when they are.  the problem is that the paper is about a process, and it's about my process in particular.  All that personal writing I do here was employed in that paper, and since it was about MY process, I wrote it in first person.  I don't think academic writing as a whole is much improved by the use of third person narrative, in fact it lends to a false sense of objectivity that isn't truly possible in writing.  So I wrote my story using my own voice, which given the circumstances makes the entire piece more readable.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  But I've already had two comments that suggest that the paper is not publishable as a first person piece, because some reviewers may be offended by the assertion that my personality and process is interesting and worth learning from.  I still stand by the belief that science is subjective, and we should stop using these screens to try to obscure this fact.

I'm just ahead of my time.  I was also told that a new and novice researcher can't get away with writing in the first person- this is a tool only allowed senior authorities.  And there is little that will irritate me more than being told I'm not allowed to write a certain way because I'm not part of the old school.  (This is the same old school that won't write in first person in the first place, so I don't see why it should even be an issue!)

The other meeting was the one where my advisor told me to get my freaking thesis published already and be done with it.  C'mon, already!  It's been three years, for fuck's sake.  Well, she didn't say it quite like that, but you get the jist of it.  That's when I broke it to her that I can't submit the damn manuscript until I get approval from the tribes I sampled from.  Oops- she didn't like that a whole lot.  doh!

It's going to be a long summer.

and jasmine is still missing.